Databases occasionally may experience performance problems, e.g., a database operation to update a set of records may require an unusually long period of time to process. When a database performance problem is encountered, a database administrator may attempt to determine the source of the performance problem by using a variety of metrics that provide statistics about the current performance of various components of the database. For example, a database administrator may examine the buffer cache hit ratio to determine if the size of the buffer cache should be increased to improve performance.
Unfortunately, interpretation of these metrics leaves a great deal of discretion to the database administrator, as the metrics often may not provide a clear indication of the source of the performance problem. Further, use of these metrics is often unwieldy for the database administrator, as each metric is often analyzed using a different graphical user interface, which results in an extremely large number of graphical user interfaces for the database administrator to traverse in attempting to locate the source of the performance problem.
Consequently, an improved method and mechanism for diagnosing database performance problems without incurring the problems associated with the approaches described above is desirable. The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.